Noticing lxxv - Emily Carr, artist

I stumbled on the name Emily Carr yesterday when I started a new Louise Penny book. Carr gave Penny the book's title, The Brutal Telling, a reference to Carr's falling-out with her father (who died when she was 17). Penny explained that Carr (1871–1945) "painted in areas of Canada, through British Columbia, that were on the verge of being ruined." Her early art was inspired by the Indigenous peoples of Canada; she spent some time in France, where she fell under the Fauvist influence; and she eventually became associated with the Group of Seven, prominent Canadian landscape painters. She painted her best-known works when she was in her fifties.

According to Wikipedia (and the Canadian Encyclopedia), "Carr's main themes in her mature work were natives and nature: 'native totem poles set in deep forest locations or sites of abandoned native villages' and, later, 'the large rhythms of Western forests, driftwood-tossed beaches and expansive skies.' She blended these two themes in ways uniquely her own. Her 'qualities of painterly skill and vision . . . enabled her to give form to a Pacific mythos that was so carefully distilled in her imagination.' "

Here are some of her paintings. I'd love to see them in person. Perhaps a trip to BC is in order.

War Canoes, Alert Bay (1912)

The Crazy Stair (The Crooked
Staircase) (1928–30)

Vanquished (1930)

Big Eagle, Skidigate (1930)

Western Forest (ca. 1931)

Totem and Forest (1931)

Mountain Forest (1936)

Forest Light (1936)

Blue Sky (1936)

Cathedral (1937)

Happiness (1939)